The March Annual issue is available, and subscribers can now start delving into the new Sinister Sewers style by Sue Daniel.

Prepare to get your feet and hands dirty in thick sewage and sludge, as you navigate drains and pipes, and contend with carnivorous plants (those rats must be tasty) and tentacled monstrosities that creep up from the depth below. But at least the streets above are clean and people can blissfully ignore the horrors beneath their feet!

The March issue is now available for all subscribers from their registration page. If you haven’t subscribed to the Annual 2024 yet, you can do so here.

For the March issue of the Cartographer’s Annual 2023 Sue Daniel is back with a glorious new battle map style for those wintry excursions. See how her forest paths of 2022 turns into new winter trails, frozen rivers and lakes, and snow-covered woods.

Compatible with Sue’s Forest Trail style form last year’s Annual, Winter Trails contains everything you need to draw snow-covered outdoor maps for those encounters in the woods.

The March issue is now available for all subscribers from their registration page.

If you haven’t subscribed to the Cartographer’s Annual 2023 yet, you can do so here.

The December issue of the Annual 2022 is now available for all subscribers. Seeing that we had so much wonderful new artwork by Sue Daniel this year, but which is stretched across multiple styles, we thought an issue on combining these into one map would be a good addition. In the process a huge battle map came to be, showing a crypt and graveyard being overtaken by an encroaching forest.

The Forest Graveyard Annual issue gives you a set of four A3 battle maps, which combine into one huge map of an old graveyard with a crypt and a ruined chapel on which the forest is encroaching. The accompanying 6-page mapping guide explains the process of combining the Forest Trail and Creepy Crypt styles into one map and template for future use.

The Decemberissue is now available for all subscribers from their registration page. If you haven’t subscribed to the Annual 2022 yet, you can do so here.

The August issue of the Cartographer’s Annual has just been released. Sue Daniel returns to her Creepy Crypts with new symbols for her beautiful dungeon floorplan style. They mesh seamlessly with the Dungeon Designer 3 style, so it can be used to extend our big dungeon add-on even further. If you don’t own DD3, you can still use the style fully, you might just notice a few missing bitmap fills if you are going through the fill styles of the templates.

As the name implies, the Creepy Crypts focuses on tombs, graves and burial sites, with the second part adding more symbols for containers, statuary, skeletons and lots of other material.

The August issue is now available for all subscribers from their registration page. If you haven’t subscribed to the Annual 2022 yet, you can do so here.

Fitting for the time of the year here in the Northern Hemisphere, the March issue of the Cartographer’s Annual brings you a wintry city style with snow-covered roofs and trees, frozen ground, deep snow drifts and frosty fields.

Sue Daniel’s Winter Village style contains more than hundred new symbols, new roof, house and street styles, as well as a host of drawing tools for those wintry settlements. The 4-page mapping guide talks you through creating such a village in a few easy steps.

The March issue is now available for all subscribers from their registration page. If you haven’t subscribed to the Annual 2022 yet, you can do so here.

The September issue of the Cartographer’s Annual 2021 is now available. Dive into city building with a great new style by Sue Daniel. The style is designed to match her Darklands overland style in tone and colors, and is named Darklands City accordingly.

The grim and gritty style contains many ruins and dilapitated buildings, and with its more than 200 new symbols and many bitmaps fills in Sue’s detailed signature style offers a gorgeous set for city mapping.

The live mapping session on ProFantasy’s YouTube channel on September 2nd 2021 (6pm UTC+2) will demo this city drawing style.

The Septmeber issue is now available for all subscribers from their registration page. If you haven’t subscribed to the Annual 2021 yet, you can do so here.

Following the Live Mapping: Repeating Textures session, recently presented by Ralf Schemmann, I will be writing a short series of blogs, or a series of short blogs, illustrating how I go about generating my own seamless tiles.  My methods are similar to those described by Ralf in the Live Mapping session, but I thought you might like to know a bit more about the workflow I use.

In this first blog I will be covering how I make seamless textures in CC3 using the available symbols from a chosen style.  This is one of the quickest ways to make a new seamless tile since it involves no drawing or any kind of work in any app other than CC3.

To make things even easier I have made a new template, which you can download from the link below and place in your C:\ProgramData\Profantasy\CC3Plus\Templates\Other folder:

Symbol Tile Generator.FCT

This is a very simple template, consisting of a black square on the BACKGROUND sheet, and the frozen MAP BORDER layer.  This black square is where you will be making your new seamless tile and will automatically define the extent of the export when it is time to export your new tile.

There is a series of red lines on a sheet and layer that are both called CROP MARKS.  These are also frozen so that you don’t end up picking them at any point and moving them around.  They are helpful guides intended to show you the extent of the tile you are making once the black square is all but covered in symbols.

The template is loosely based on the Mike Schley Overland style, and is designed to generate tiles that are 1000 px x 1000 px, but it can be used to generate symbol tiles in any style if you locate the relevant symbol catalogue by browsing the directory and adjust the export size.

For this example I will use the MS overland trees to create a seamless tile that I can use in conjunction with the published tree fills that come with the style.  This will help to break up any unwanted tile patterns caused by mapping extensive areas of unbroken forest using only the published tree fills.

The first step is to pick the set of symbols you want to use, and start pasting them all over the black square at the default symbol size (usually 1) until there is no more black to be seen between the symbols.  Don’t worry about pasting them so that they are in the correct order.  Just cover the black square.

Use Symbols-Sort Symbols In Map , right click in the view window and pick All, then press D for do it.

Now to move this block of trees and copy it so that we move the edges to the centre, just as Ralf did with his sand texture in the Live Mapping session referenced at the top of this blog.

Turn the SNAP and GRID buttons on and make sure you have the 50 mile, 2 snap grid selected when you right click the GRID button.

Pick the Move tool and select all the trees with a box selection and press D for do it.  Then pick the trees at the central snap point and move that point to one of the four corners.  It doesn’t matter which one, as long as you snap the central point to one of the corners, like this.

Using the Copy tool, copy and paste this block of trees 3 times from this corner to all the other corners.

Once you have done this sort the symbols again as above, and hopefully you will have something that looks a bit like this

Now for the magical part.

File-Save as… Pick the PNG Bitmap file option in the Save as type: box, and open the Options dialog.  The template you are using has been set up to generate 1000 x 1000 pixel sized tiles, so set the height and width of the export to 1000 x 1000.  Make sure the checkboxes are ticked as shown, and CC3 will automatically export just the area covered by the black square, and no more or less than that.

I exported my example fill to a subfolder within the Bitmaps\Tiles folder.  I called my personal folder User, but you can call yours whatever you like.  It’s yours.

Ralf covered how to import your new fills in the Live Mapping session linked to at the top of this article, so I won’t make this article any longer than it needs to be by repeating it again right here.

This is the result of importing my new fill and drawing my first polygon with it.  Remember that I said the template is designed to give you a tile that is 1000 x 1000 map units?  Combine this information with the fact that symbols and fills are ideally imported to overland maps at a resolution of 20 pixels per map unit, and you get a scale of 50 map units to set for your new fill.  this should perfectly match the scale of the original symbols you used to create the fill in the first place.

When you have had a practice using just one random collection, try mixing collections, or even using a background texture and spacing out your trees.  You can also do this with other symbols, so you could try hills or mountains

In our weekly live mapping series on YouTube I’ve been revisiting the first styles that I created for the Cartographer’s Annual back in 2007. Sue Daniel took it upon herself to create new maps with these styles as examples and here are the next two beautiful results!

Sarah Wroot Overland

April saw the first style by a freelance artist which we converted into an Annual style. Saraw Wroot had been producing maps for Pelgrane Press’ Dying Earth RPG and her handdrawn style and watercoloury look translated well into the new sheet effect-powered visuals of CC3+.

(Download the FCW file)

Cave and Cavern Maps

The May Annual issue of 2007 saw me delving into natural caves, using noth Dungeon Designer 3’s style and a new modern map look, which I had kind of pioneered in the Source Maps: Temples, Tombs and Catacombs collection. Sue took the DD3 version to produce this great spiral cave layout.

(Download the FCW file)

The July issue of the Cartographer’s Annual is now available. Dive under the waves and explore the ocean shores with Sue Daniel’s vibrant Marine Dungeon style.

Swim alongside bull sharks and sea turtles to find the treasure and horrors hidden beneath the sand of the ocean floor. More than 130 new symbols and 18 textures can be combined with the artwork of Dungeon Designer 3 to give your floorplans and battle maps a whole new – watery – dimension.

The July issue is now available for all subscribers from their registration page. If you haven’t subscribed to the Annual 2021 yet, you can do so here.

In our weekly live mapping series on YouTube I’ve been revisiting the first styles that I created for the Cartographer’s Annual back in 2007. Sue Daniel took it upon herself to create new maps with these styles as examples and his the next great result.

Fantasy Tavern

The third Annual was a detailed multi-floor map of a roadside inn, which added a few tools and fills to Dungeon Designer 3 in the form of the “Fantasy Tavern” style. What Sue first proposed as a “Stable” in that style quickly grew into this wonderful Renaissance Longhouse.

(Download the FCW File)

(Download the FCW File)